Campaigning for equal pay – 50 years on

Professor Louise Jackson, presenting to the STUC Women's Conference on the trajectory of media representation of workplace sexual harassment
By Hazel Conley, Frances Galt, Louise Jackson and Tanya Rhodes The ‘Gender Equalities at Work’ project team was delighted to attend the Scottish Trades Unions Congress (STUC) Women’s Conference in Glenrothes, 31 October to 1 November 2022, to discuss...

The Equal Opportunities Commission: an achievement of its time?

by Sophia Ayada[1] The Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), established by the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act (SDA), was one of the most prominent gender equality bodies in Europe. Now replaced by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), whose remit...

IWD2022: Women’s Activism on the Screen: Leeds – United! (1974) and the 1970 Leeds Clothing Workers Strike

by Frances C Galt The 1970 Leeds Clothing Workers Strike is memorialised in the BBC’s Play for Today, Leeds – United! (BBC1, 31 October 1974), which provides a dramatized account of the women-led dispute. Leeds – United! is a...

IWD2022: Business as Usual? Using film to challenge sexual harassment in the 1980s

By Louise Jackson Released in 1987, the low-budget feature film Business as Usual focuses on the character of Babs Flynn, a Liverpool fashion store manager sacked for complaining about the sexual harassment of younger female colleagues by their male...

IWD2022: Revisiting the 1968 Ford Dagenham Dispute (again)

by Hazel Conley In the first of our posts marking International Women’s Day 2022, Professor Hazel Conley looks at some of the beliefs and arguments surrounding the dispute by women sewing machinists in the Ford Dagenham plant in 1968,...

Gender equalities at work: Black and Asian women and the misrecognition of intersectional justice claims

By Ashlee Christoffersen This post looks beyond legislation and parliamentary debates about gender equality at work to consider the stories of Black and Asian women’s workplace activism and their wider campaigning relating to workplace gender equality. These are stories...

Intersectionality, race and the Sex Discrimination Act: The construction of equality silos

By Ashlee Christoffersen The Gender Equalities at Work project is exploring how the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 (SDA), Equal Pay Act 1970, and their successor the Equality Act 2010 were created, introduced, implemented and changed, in what contexts and...

Gender Equalities at Work – background to the project

The team behind Gender Equalities at Work are setting out to capture the journey of workplace gender equality legislation in the 50 years spanning the introduction of the 1970 Equal Pay Acts (EPAs), the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act (SDA)...